Atrios: "This blog does not exist to promote you, your blog, your business, your organization, your pet issue or cause. Failure to promote or link to any particular thing should not be taken as disapproval of it."

Fine.

The two besieged big bloggers believe they have no responsibilities.

Then why should the mainstream media ever listen to them?

Why should the Democrat Party ever listen to them?

Why should we ever listen to them?

I average about 1,000 hits a week. That's nothing compared to those guys but it means a lot to me. I do have responsibility. I don't have the kind of blog that blogs about everything under the sun but when my readers ask me to cover an issue I respond. I don't attack them or tell them to go fuck themselves.

Markos has every right to be a sexist prig if he wants to be.

Atrios has every right to link to his circle jerk buddies instead of more important stories if he wants to.

Those two bloggers have told us over and over again that they don't consider themselves journalists and that they don't have to subscribe to any sort of ethical guidelines.

Fine.

Message received loud and clear.

Stop reading them.

My responsibility is to do whatever I can to help the progressive, liberal, democratic people in this country.

There are other bloggers out there who feel like I do.

I don't get jobs and work through Joe Trippi. I don't get money from George Soros.

Joe Trippi and George Soros don't tell me what to write and I don't know if they tell Markos and Atrios what to write but since they both claim that they have no responsibility to their readers I can only guess who it is they are listening to.

I don't think the bloggers at The Booman Tribune or The Big Brass Blog would agree with the irresponsible sentiments of Markos and Atrios. Why not support them? Why not push them to the top? Why not let Markos and Atrios allow themselves to attain the irrelevance that they seem to want?

I believe all of us political bloggers have responsiblities. Especially if we blog as much about the responsibilities of the Fourth Estate as Markos and Atrios do.

I want to support bloggers who believe in bringing us all together. I want to support bloggers who reply to emails and comments left at their blogs. I want to support bloggers who care about their readers' concerns.

Markos and Atrios seem to only care about themselves.

Fuck them.

(REPLACEMENT UPDATE: I have a very good reason for deleting the last update, which I don't feel like explaining right now. Anyway, five days after writing this, I'd also like to rethink half of this post. Although I'm not going to apologize for what I wrote, since that's the way I felt then, I would like to amend my harsh criticism of Atrios. At the time, my main beef with Atrios was that not only hadn't he blogged about the Downing Street minutes, he also downplayed them in an interview on C-SPAN. But I was wrong. He did refer to it, and link to Conyers Blog on May 2nd, which I had stupidly overlooked. And since the day I wrote this, he's blogged about the minutes nearly every day. I don't know why he had a change of heart, maybe it was some of the criticism or maybe he just realized that the general public wasn't as knowledgable as the folks in the blogosphere. All I know is that every time I get upset enough to attack him, he seems to do something to change my mind. So maybe I'll remember that in the future, and give him the benefit of the doubt. But Markos can still go fuck himself, since he seems to constantly go out of his way to shit upon women.)

Contributors

"Or take this guy, Ron Brynaert, a tenacious (lefty, stand alone) investigator with an instinct for where information and proof and the jugular are. He's a natural: Why isn't he on someone's I-team?" Jay Rosen, June 6, 2005.